


Ordonnance

by chronicAngel



Series: Concresce [6]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: F/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, POV Third Person, Pictures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-09 18:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15273789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronicAngel/pseuds/chronicAngel
Summary: ordonnanceadj. proper coordination of figures in a picture





	Ordonnance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mikorins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikorins/gifts).



She wakes up in the middle of the night (not for the first time) sweaty and still exhausted, and finds that she has squeezed herself to take up as little space as she can against the wall next to Ezreal's bed (again not for the first time). She does this often when she wakes up from nightmares, and it takes her a moment to peel herself away from the wall. She finally notices that Ezreal is not in bed with her after her eyes have already adjusted, as she goes to gently crawl over him (he has a tendency to sleep on the outside of the bed and she suspects it is exactly so she cannot do things like this) and finds his usual spot unoccupied.

She has to take a deep breath to stop shaking once her feet hit the floor, willing herself to stand. She thinks that all Demacians get nightmares, but she doesn't imagine they're so bad as hers are. (After all, she is one of the _bad_ Demacians, raised to believe that magic was something wicked that needed to be destroyed before learning she had it herself.) She does not let herself linger on this thought, instead taking small steps toward the door to search for him. It doesn't take long. The light is peeking through the crack under the door of the first room she thinks to look in.

He does not notice when she opens the door and leans against the door frame to quietly observe him for a moment. He is hyper-focused on something, the way he tends to get when he thinks he has found something in one of his old books, and it only takes her a moment to register that he is sketching something.

"Trying to replicate something originated by someone long dead again?" Despite the teasing note (or the amused undertone once she sees his shoulders jump), she is genuinely curious. He doesn't look over his shoulder at her, instead muttering something to himself about his drawing, and if he hadn't been visibly startled she might suspect he didn't hear her at all. She takes a few steps closer, leaning forward against his back and resting her chin on top of his head to peer at his work. "Did something wake you?"

"Couldn't sleep," he murmurs just loud enough that she can hear it, and she hums. She does not point out that he was already asleep when she came to bed because she suspects he really means that he doesn't want to talk about it.

She lets the room go quiet as she more closely examines the paper he is still drawing on, and it looks to her like she caught him in the earliest stages of sketching a person, with a collection of basic shapes and lines in the build of a sitting person (she thinks it is a woman, based on the narrower shoulders, but he could just as believably be drawing Ekko for whatever reason). She does not ask what or who he is drawing, instead watching as he defines the shapes into things more recognizable as a chest and arms, erases traced lines on the head to draw the face, and wipes away what she suspects is meant to be hair multiple times in frustration while commenting under his breath about its volume being off. It eventually begins to take shape, though; the likeness of a woman Luxanna has never met.

Before she has an opportunity to ask, Ezreal says, "I don't remember all the little details anymore." He turns to face her, nuzzling his face into her collarbone as best he can while still sitting, and she moves her fingers to run through his hair gently. "She had freckles. Real freckles, not like the things Demacians get that go away after a couple months. She used to come back from places like Ionia and Shurima _covered_ in them." She realizes, at this point, that it's supposed to be his mother. She is not what Demacians would call beautiful. Her edges are too soft and her eyelashes too long. She would be swept away as too feminine, too weak. Lux knows from all of his stories that she is the exact opposite-- because it takes strength to leave something you love without knowing if or when you'll be back. ( _It takes strength to leave Ezreal_.)

She looks at this picture, which Lux imagines is far more accurate than Ezreal can see, and she questions the Demacian standards of beauty because she sees nothing but radiant allure from this woman who spent more time crawling through dirty ruins than donning armor on a bloody battlefield. She looks at this picture of a woman she has never met and she _feels_ her warmth like a tight embrace one covets from a distant parent (she is familiar with the concept). She does not see a woman playing the role of a mother she has never actually been; she sees a woman who carries a thousand stories from a thousand places on the tip of her tongue, waiting for a curious child to ask.

"You know, you have pictures of your mother," she says eventually, when Ezreal has been quiet for so long she almost wonders if he hasn't dozed off. She supposes neither of them has slept very much tonight.

"I know," he deadpans, cracking his eyes open just to glare up at her, but there is no real malice in the look. "It's different, though. I could have a hundred pictures of my mom, but sometimes I feel like..." He trails off, and she watches him closely for the ways his face shifts when he's thinking. He looks terribly uncomfortable, but there's a layer beneath that, something that is too terrifyingly close to pain. (But she knows, _she knows_ that it's not physical. That it's deeper than that.) "I'm worried that I'm gonna forget their faces, sometimes. Not just the way they look in pictures but... Mom's face when she was reading or Dad's tired smiles when they finally got home from an expedition."

Her heart hurts for Ezreal. She cannot imagine missing her parents as terribly much as he misses his, but she can also not imagine thinking she is forgetting their faces. (She cannot imagine leaving Demacia for any length of time and not knowing that the moment her mission was finished she would return to her fake life with her fake parents and their fake happiness together.)

"We should get some sleep," she suggests softly, and he nods tiredly against her chest. He pushes the paper to a corner of his desk that, in her opinion, looks too empty and then allows her to lead him back to his own room. "We'll do something fun tomorrow," she offers, though it is always difficult for her to find anything very fun about Piltover, and he accepts this quietly and follows her back to sleep.

She wakes up before him-- because she _always_ wakes up before him-- but does not move to get up. His arms are wrapped around her waist, but it is in the loose and comfortable way and not the tight, clinging way he gets after most nights like last, so she settles on her side and cards her fingers affectionately through his messy hair while he continues to sleep. He always looks so much more peaceful when he sleeps, a concept she can never understand. She can hardly imagine looking as calm when she is sleeping as he does now.

It must be an hour before he finally peels his eyes open, blinking the sleep from his gaze and then glancing up at her with an expression that seems so... _gentle_. He looks at her like she is the whole world.

"G'morning," he finally mumbles after a minute, and her cheeks heat up as she realizes that she has been staring. "How long have you been awake?" He adds after a second, without making any move to let go of her.

"An hour or so," she answers after a minute, taking a moment to simply observe his tired expressions.

He groans as he sits up like an old man with weary joints. He swoops down to kiss the muscle in her shoulder and then squishes his cheek against it, his eyes half-lidded even as he jokes, "You could have woken me up." She thinks he says it simply so she has to admit that she enjoyed watching him sleep. She doesn't give him the satisfaction, finally moving to get up and properly dressed. She sees him pouting at her and knows she was right.

It takes him less time to get ready in the mornings than it takes her even as she often starts first, and so he is already stretched out on the couch like he's trying to go back to sleep by the time she steps out of his bedroom. "Ezreal," she scolds.

"Lux," he shoots back less than a second later, but he sits up and makes room for her next to him which she chooses not to occupy. "So, what fun thing are we doing today?" She thinks this is funny because it is usually her asking him this question (and it is usually sarcastic). As the explorer of the pair, he is often the one dragging her on unwilling adventures which she can begrudgingly admit later are actually fun. He is the one who discovers locations that should be perfectly mundane and by some magic finds something amazing about them which he then shares with her without hesitation.

"I think I'll surprise you," she answers after a minute, and he rolls his eyes and scoffs that this is code for _I haven't figured it out yet_. She thinks he is half-right even as she argues that he should have more faith in her and drags him out into the City of Progress. Though she has a vague idea of the end result she is going for and it wouldn't be a challenge for her to find the means for it in Demacia, she knows Piltover as well as she knows herself (which is to say, she's still figuring it out). Still, he is patient as she tugs him along through the streets, and she catches him smiling out of the corner of her eye as she occasionally gets distracted by little shops with trinkets she has never heard of and large buildings she has somehow missed in her visits to the city. They spend ten minutes standing outside of a large bank even as she admits she has no reason to go inside. (She admires Piltover's architecture, the foreign way their buildings are pieced together. It is not the style and order of Demacia's cities, that much is certain.)

Finally, between a shop which is full of smoke that she thinks sells chemicals of some sort and a building that must be at least fifty percent window which shows off long-legged, elegant girls doing dances that remind her much more of Ionia than anything one would see in a class in Piltover, she sees a sign in peeling golden lettering reading _Hankin Oz's Uncanny Apery_. It is deceptively small, she learns once she drags Ezreal inside. "Let's get a picture done," she had said brightly.

Hankin Oz is a short man with thin patches of wild white hair behind either of his temples and thick spectacles that rest on the tip of his nose as he greets them cheerily and _loudly_. He is the exact sort of eccentric type one expects to encounter in Piltover, and where that once might have made her uncomfortable, it actually brings a small smile to her lips now. It does not make her feel any less awkward as he tells them three times to get closer together before he picks up a piece of charcoal.

Ezreal rubs at the back of his neck with his gauntleted hand and murmurs to her, "What made you want to do this?" Her eyes slide to the opposite side of the room as him and her eyebrows knit together in embarrassment at the implication that he does not want to do this.

"I don't have any pictures with you. I have dozens with Garen and our parents, there are even portraits of Fiora and me done shortly before she..." She trails off. She doesn't want to get angry about the Laurent fiasco all over again. "Besides, it seemed like drawings were important to you."

She stiffens when he laughs. There is nothing about it that is inherently hurtful, but she still feels her heart clench for a moment like he has insulted her. (Or rejected her, in some way.) He does not stop laughing until the little man who is still sketching them glances up from his drawing to scold Ezreal, and he has the courtesy to look somewhat apologetic as he lifts his hand to his neck again. "I love you," he says, and her cheeks heat up. Without prompting, he adds, "It wasn't the drawing that was important to me. It was the person in it." There's something about the way he says it that sounds thankful anyway.

Unlike the large oil paintings hanging in the halls of the Crownguard manor, they only have to stand there for ten minutes before Oz holds the picture up to the light (for what purpose she can't tell) and then gestures for them to come look at it. She doesn't think either of them looks particularly comfortable in the sketch, but she thinks it is as true to life as she could ask for. Before she can open her mouth to ask about compensation, he beams and hands her the picture. "Free for the nice young couple," he says, and then disappears somewhere in the back of his little shop (she wonders if it can even be called a shop).

"That was hardly a sound business practice," she says incredulously to Ezreal as they step out of the shop, and he snorts and takes the picture from her, carefully folding it into quarters. It shortly finds a home in one of his many pockets, and then he takes her hand and pulls her back toward his home with a soft sort of smile.


End file.
